branch there, but each agency corresponded direct with the head office in England. The Co. took a very commanding position at an early date. It does not, like most of the other British cos., make up a special ann. statement showing the result of its American bus., but files its general bal. sheet in each State where it transacts bus. The F. bus. transacted by the Co. in the State of N. Y. for the year ending 31st December, 1869, was as follows: Amount of F. risks written during the year £3,972,118. Net prem. received £16,554 ; losses £10,354; taxes £682. The Royal is believed to lose about £20,000 by the Chicago conflagration.

About 1855 the Monarch (No. 1) F. and L. founded a branch in N. Y.; and the same was continued down to 1857, when the entire bus. of the Co. was trans. to Liverpool and London.

In 1857 the Unity Fire commenced bus. in the U.S., and continued the same down to 1862, when its entire bus. merged into Liverpool and Lond. The U.S. branch was carried on with considerable success.

In 1857, the Eagle took over the bus. of Albion, and commenced itself to carry on bus. in the U.S. It has since ceased to issue any new pol. On 31st December, 1869, the total assets of the Co. in the U.S. stood at £64,855. The pol. in force were 797, ins. £422,000. In that year 25 of its pol. had terminated, 8 by death, 12 by surrender, 3 by lapsing, and 2 by change.

In 1858 the Northern commenced bus. in the U.S. with a great deal of enterprise. It withdrew from direct bus. in 1862, very much, we believe, in consequence of the war. It still has an interest in U.S. bus. under re-insurance contracts, and suffers to the extent of some £20,000 by the recent fire at Chicago.

In 1866 the Queen commenced F. bus. in the U.S., and continues the same at the present time. The position of the branch on 31st December, 1869, was the following: Aggregate available assets £59,933; amount required to ins. outstanding risks £28, 166; outstanding losses and expenses £6,368; together £34,515; leaving a surplus of £25,418. Amount of F. risks underwritten during the year £2,330, 153; prems. received £22,314; losses paid £9,645. The Co. is believed to have sustained no loss in Chicago.

In the same year (1866) the North British and Mercantile also founded a F. branch in the U.S., and almost at once took a commanding position. The financial position of the branch on 31st December, 1869, was as follows:-Aggregate available assets £154,777; aggregate liabilities, including re-ins. of all outstanding risks, £75,917; leaving a surplus of £78,860. The income of the year was £163,473; the expenditure £95,507; the amount of risks in force £10,608,458.

This Co. is believed to lose about £400,000 by the fire at Chicago. With a promptness characteristic of the management, the agents were instructed to settle all claims, and draw for the amounts at sight. The "noble telegram" was duly appreciated on the other side. In 1867 the Imperial F. opened a branch in the U.S., and at once commanded a considerable bus. The position of the branch on 31st December, 1869, was as follows:Aggregate amount of actual available assets 129.595; aggregate liabilities, including re-ins. of all outstanding risks £71,957; surplus £57,618; income of the year £117,661; expenditure £134,889. Amount of pol. in force £8,339, 145, yielding in prems. £103,054. The losses of this Co. at the Chicago fire are reported to be considerable; as much as £100,000 being named. Whatever the amount, it is certain the Co. has the means of paying promptly.

In 1870 the Commercial Union opened a F. branch in the U.S., making of course the necessary deposits. It is believed the Co's. loss in connexion with the Chicago fire will not exceed £15,000.

We have mentioned that the Phenix and Northern are sufferers at Chicago through re-ins. contracts. We believe the London Assu., Lancashire, and Britannia also suffer in the same way; also various French and German offices.

AMERICA, HIST. OF INS. IN.-We propose for several reasons not to enter upon the inquiry suggested by the preceding title at this stage of the present work. Our chief reason is that the learned editor of the Ins. Monitor of N. Y.-Mr. C. C. Hine-has been for several years engaged in the preparation of a work which is to be A Hist. of Ins. in the U.S. We have only recently become aware of this fact-after the materials for our chap. had been in a great measure prepared: but we have no desire, and no intention, to trespass upon his territory. We have enough to do on our own side. We must, of necessity, make frequent reference to American actuaries, American authors, and American principles and practice. We must also present our art. on AMERICAN MORT. TABLES, for the purpose of comparison with those of Gt. Brit. and the continent of Europe, as they appear in these pages. Then under the head of UNITED STATES, we can add so much upon the general hist. of Ins. there as may appear necessary for the completeness of our work. We think and hope even the "Stern Monitor" ll be content with this adjustment.'

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AMERICA, INS. LAWS OF.-There are in the U.S. 39 States and territories having regulations affecting the conduct of home, and admission of the Cos. of other States, and foreign Cos. and the conditions of admission, etc. We cannot deal with these in any brief and intelligent manner under one general head; we therefore propose to give a very

brief outline of the leading requirements of the laws in each State and territory under its name, in alphabetical order. See ALABAMA. Our difficulty will be to keep accurately posted as we go along. We must do our best. Some of the early laws in the State of N. Y. possess points of very considerable interest. If the NATIONAL INS. CONVENTION now in session should succeed in one of its primary objects, namely, uniform action and requirements from the several States in the matter of Ins., a great good will be accomplished. AMERICAN "EXPERIENCE TABLE." See AMERICAN TABLES OF MORT. AMERICAN LIFE ASSU. MAG. AND JOURNAL OF ACTUARIES, founded in N. Y. in 1859, and edited by Mr. G. E. Currie. We have the work down to 1867, during which period there were very few high-class papers embodied in it: by which we mean papers from the pens of the able actuaries of which the U.S. can now boast. We have not seen the later vols. AMERICAN TABLES OF MORT.-We propose here to give some account of the several TABLES OF MORT. which have been constructed in America upon American data. There have been in the U.S., as here and elsewhere, various mort. obs. which have not resulted in Tables of Mort. These we shall give a chronological account of under UNITED STATES WIGGLESWORTH'S TABLE (1789). In the year 1782 Prof. Edward Wigglesworth, of the Harvard University, entered upon an investigation of the early Bills of Mort. kept in various parishes in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, some of which he states had been kept for a long course of years. These observations resulted in 1789 in the formation of "A Table showing the prob, of the duration, the decrement, and the expectation of life in the States of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, formed from 62 Bills of Mort. on the files of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in the year 1789." Under our art. on BILLS OF MORT. we shall give some account of these. For our present purposes it will be sufficient to state that the whole number of deaths on the bills was 4893, which happened at the following periods of life :

Upon this data he prepared his Table, showing the persons living and the decrements at each age of life, and the expectation of life at quinquennial periods only. We propose for brevity sake to reduce the whole table to the quinquennial periods :

Now this Table in this particular state would have been liable to all the objections which are justly urged against the NORTHAMPTON TABLE. The learned Professor was fully aware of this-and he gives the required adjustments, as well as the reasons for them, in the following para. :

From these elements [those of the first table], the Table is formed by taking the number of deaths as the radix of calculation. This would have given the proportional number of persons living and dying at every age, from the birth to the latest extremity of life, had the ann. number of deaths been equal to the births. But by the bills it appears that the births are ann, double the deaths. Therefore the number of persons of each age as given by the Table, is less than is actually in life together, from an ann. excess of 4893 births. Consequently the expectation of life is less than just, especially at the early periods of life.

The whole number of inhabitants, according to this table, is 140,182, of which 48,183 are persons under 16 years of age, and 91,000 above 16 years of age. By the enumeration of the inhabitants of Massachusetts, the whole number of free males under 16 was 95,453, and 87,189 above 16. Therefore 35,851 persons under 16 must be added to those in the table under 16, to make the table accord with the enumeration, which will give 176,633 inhabitants, produced by an excess of 4893 ann. births. This add. will raise the expectation of a child just born from 28 15 years to 35'47 years; of a child 5 years of age from 40'87 years to 48'46 years; of a person of 10 years, from 39 23 years to 43'23 years; of a person of 15 years from 36'16 to 36'50 years. The ann. excess of 4893 births above the deaths, on a stock of 176,033 inhabitants, determines the period of duplication to be 25 30 years, etc.

This table was afterwards adopted by the Supreme Court of Massachusetts as a rule in estimating the value of Life Estates-but whether with or without the corrections which

its learned author indicated that it required does not appear.

It seemed not to have been present in his mind that the table should be used for the purposes of Life Ins. [LIFE CONTINGENCIES.]

Mr. C. C. Hine, from whose "specimen sheets" we have drawn some of the above

details, says:

Though the Northampton Table is notoriously faulty, the time which its experience covers, and the conditions under which it was formed, naturally suggest it for comparison with that of Massachusetts. A comparison of the two shows that at all ages under 15, the death rate of the two tables is nearly the same; from which we may infer that if the pop. of Northampton was stationary, the mort. among the Massachusetts children of that day was much less than in the English town. Above 15 the death rate of Massachusetts was greatly ahead, until middle life was reached; the result, no doubt, of the harsh New England climate on constitutions which had not sufficient strength to withstand the pulmonary and other disorders incident to a new and sparsely settled country. Above this point the selected lives which remain with constitutions estab. and inured, enjoy a degree of longevity unsurpassed on the whole by any country in Europe. But the most remarkable correspondence is that exhibited between this table of Professor Wigglesworth, and the late results of the census returns, as deduced by Mr. Meech. [See 1860.]

PENNSYLVANIA TABLE (1814).—The Pennsylvania Co. for Assu, upon Lives was founded in 1812, and very soon after its estab. computed, for its own use, Tables of the Expectation of Life, drawn from two sources, viz., (1) the reports of the Philadelphia Board of Health; (2) records of the Episcopal Church. We have not at hand any details of the exact data furnished from these sources, but we have the results, which are sufficient for our present purposes:

This Table, contrasted with some of the others, indicates the higher death-rate of American cities, as against the rural districts.

GILL'S TABLE (1842).—When the Mutual of N.Y. was in course of formation in 1842, Prof. Gill was called upon to supply a suitable table of mort. on which to base its operations as a mut. office. The way he accomplished his task was this: He took the EQUITABLE EXPERIENCE, the SWEDISH, and such other good Tables as he was familiar with, and obtained an average of their results. From that table he deduced the prems. The table was, we believe, afterwards submitted to various English actuaries, and approved. We need not pursue this table-great as have been the results flowing from its use, combined with proper management. It is our purpose only to deal with tables founded on orig. obs. KENNEDY'S TABLES (1850).-In 1852 Mr. Joseph C. G. Kennedy, who had been superintendent of the U.S. census of 1850, pub. his report on the census, including therein two tables of mort. based upon the returns of that census, for the States of Massachusetts and Maryland. Regarding these it must be noted that the records of mort. only extended over the census year; and though it is considered to have been an average year for deaths, yet the assumption that the pop. affected by so many causes of irregular movement is to be taken as stationary is one that greatly depreciates the value of any tables deduced therefrom. The mort. of Maryland, comprising a pop. of 583,034, and showing a death-rate of 1·685 p.c., was considered by Mr. Kennedy to be a fair estimate of the standard of human life in the older settled States. Mr. S. Brown called attention to the fact (Assu. Mag. vol. viii. p. 187), that as to male life this table differed but little from the English Table (No. 1), while for female life it gave an expectation of from 1 to 2 years above the English Table. The other table, from the returns for Massachusetts, was also for males and females separately.

The following abstract of the above Tables, compared with the English Table (No. 1), based on the census of 1841, will be sufficient for all purposes here. The figures show the "expectation of life" at the several ages named :

There appears to have been a table of mort. deduced from the New York State Census taken in 1855; but we have never seen it, and the references we have met with are too slight o enable us to give any note of results.

The English Reg -Gen. said in his 5th Rep. (1843):

The census has been taken with great regularity in the U.S.-it was part of the constitution of the States that it should be so taken for political purposes--and the ages are properly distinguished; but abstracts of the registers of deaths have only been pub. in Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and perhaps a few other of the older cities. No National Life Table can therefore be formed until, in addition to the census, a careful system of registration of deaths is introduced.

ELLIOT'S TABLE (1857).—About 1857 a table of mort. was constructed by Mr. E. B. Elliot, based upon the census returns of 1850 for the State of Massachusetts. This table was pub. in the Proc. of the Amer. Asso. for the Adv. of Science, held at Montreal, in 1857. It was understood to form part of an orig. series which had been prepared for the New England Mut. Ins. Co. of Boston, U.S., from extensive and trustworthy European and American data. The following abstract of this table, comparing its results with those of the Carlisle Table, will be sufficient for our present purposes:

It appears that from about age 5 to age 15, lower rates of mort. prevailed in Massachusetts than is generally the case in European communities; that from age 15 to various ages between 35 and 50, the Massachusetts rates are much higher than, after which they again fall somewhat below, the European rates. Under the age of 5 years, the mort. in Massachusetts seems more intense than in Europe generally; from 3 to 15 it approaches closely to that of Sweden; from 17 to 45 nearer to Belgium, though higher; and after 45, nearer to, but lower than, the average English rates. As a whole the mort. of Massachusetts is better represented by that of England than of any other European state.

MUTUAL BENEFIT TABLE (1858).—In 1858 the directors of the Mut. Benefit Life Ins. Co. of New Jersey, pub. the mort. experience of the office for the 12 years it had then been in existence. Its members had averaged 4,000, until the later years, when they had been about 5,000. In the observations, lives were carefully distinguished from policies; and pains were also taken to ascertain with accuracy—(1) the number of persons who, at each age of life, took or renewed a pol. by payment of prem.; (2) how many died within the year the policy had to run. Each age therefore included new or recent selections, as well as those of earlier date, added together in each successive year of the Co's. existence. The experience had been very favourable, much of which was due to the effect of recent selection. The following is an abstract of a mort. table deduced from the experience named, prepared, we believe, by Mr. Sheppard Homans. The number of actual deaths are contrasted with the number of "probable deaths" as shown by the Carlisle and the Experience Tables.

HOMANS' TABLE (No. 1) —In 1859 there was pub. by the Mutual Ins. Co. of N. Y. an elaborate report on the affairs of that Co., which had been prepared by Mr. Sheppard Homans, its actuary. The general features of that report it is not our present purpose here to deal with. They will be discussed, with the details of some previous reports on the affairs of the same Co., by its previous actuary, Professor Gill, under UNITED STATES; where we propose to give a pretty complete outline, not only of the growth and development of ins. in all its branches, but also of MORT. OBS. made in that great country, and of many incidental matters. Forming part of the report under notice was a TABLE of MORT. constructed by Mr. Homans, upon the mort. experience of the Mutual. It is of this table and the facts immediately connected with it that we have now to speak. The table is based upon the experience of the office during a period of 15 years ending 1858, that is, through the entire duration of the office. The number of lives existing at the date of observation was 10,387, of which 9,485 were "whole life," 572 "seven years" pols. ; 174 for other short terms, and 156 were "endow." pols. It will not fail to be noted that the number of lives here under observation was greater than the entire pop. of either Northampton or Carlisle, at the respective dates of the observations which have been named after them. The following explanation given by Mr. Homans must not be overlooked : With the exception of this single assumption, that the office age is the real age, the results which are now presented are deduced from the most rigorous calculation. The number of lives exposed to mort. are carefully separated from the number of policies, and no care or labour has been spared in making the various observations and deductions as complete and accurate as possible.

The amount insured under the above policies was (taking 5 dols. to the £) £6,094,739, while the bonus add. thereon amounted to £656,446, making a total of £6,751,185. We now reach the table, which Mr. Homans calls "an adjusted rate of mort. according to the general experience of the Mut. Life Ins. Co. of N.Y. for the 15 years ending Feb. 1, 1858." We propose here only to give an abstract of the table, because we shall have to give it in detail hereafter, when it shall have passed through all the adjustments,' graduation," and other crucial tests, which it is the fate of such tables to encounter. The orig. is placed for purposes of comparison alongside the table on which the operations of the Co. were based: that test we have no purpose in here repeating. The quinquennial results were as follows:

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After making various comparisons with other existing tables, Mr. Homans remarks: We here find that our adjusted experience gives a higher expectation of life at all ages than the co's. theoretical table, and also higher than any English table below the age of 70, except the "Friendly Sos.," according to Neison, which is uniformly higher at all ages. At and above the age of 70, the expectation by several English tables is higher than that shown by our own experience. The favourable results in the experience of this co. may be attributed to two principal causes, namely, the influence of selection, by which persons in sound health only are admitted as members of the Co., and the fact that among these members are to be found so many married men as heads of families.

MEECH'S TABLE (1860).—Mr. Meech, a well-known American actuary, has deduced a mort. table for white male life, from the results of the U.S. census of 1860, of which the following is an abstract :